


Daphne

by Iolaire02



Series: The Butterfly Effect: Character Backstories [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Mentioned Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26375305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iolaire02/pseuds/Iolaire02
Summary: This girl will never be the Ice Queen.She leaves for Hogwarts, and is relieved. She has heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Relationships: Daphne Greengrass & Mr Greengrass
Series: The Butterfly Effect: Character Backstories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1916749
Kudos: 3





	Daphne

**Author's Note:**

> Just like I have a hard time believing that eleven-year-olds can be obviously evil enough that they can all be put into the same House together, I also have a hard time believing that an eleven-year-old can come across as a cold, heartless bitch. Maybe they can, and I just haven't met one like that, but here: have my offering of a non-Ice Queen Daphne Greengrass.
> 
> Like Blaise, this is what I will be going off of as I try to characterize her.
> 
> Enjoy!

When she is… oh, seven, she walks into the family library and finds her mother with a man who is not her father. She walks away before they see her. At dinner that night, she asks her mother who it was, and everything just… stops. After that, her mother seems angry all the time, and her father seems so, so sad. They don’t talk to each other much, and when they do, it is in shouts. 

At first, she thinks it is her fault (after all, there was no shouting _before_ that dinner), but her father takes her aside one day, when she is sitting by the window, staring out at the sun and green grass and bright colors, and tells her that she is not to blame. 

“Sometimes,” he tells her, “people make bad decisions, and those decisions affect the people around them.”

“Your mother made a bad decision, and even if you hadn’t said something, it would have come out eventually,” he tells her kindly. He doesn’t say what _it_ is, but she knows he’s talking about her mother’s choices. 

She thinks about it for a moment. “Can’t our magic prevent people from making those bad choices that affect others?” Her father looks at her, his brows furrowed, before picking her up and putting her on his knee. 

He speaks slowly, his voice more serious than she’s ever heard it. “There are spells and contracts that can put someone completely under another person’s control, so the controller makes all the choices for the person they control.” He looks at her thoughtfully before continuing. “Such spells and contracts are banned, now, and not least because you can change the person completely. You can rewrite them to be someone else, regardless of their wishes, and you can do it so that they never even remember they were someone else to begin with.” The way he says it is very, very calm, and very, very detached. 

“Why are such things banned, when they could clearly make people perfect?” Daphne asks him, and her father looks at her solemnly.

“Do you know anybody who is perfect, anyone who could handle such responsibility?” 

She thinks for a moment, wonders why he phrased the question that way, because she knows her father is perfect, of _course_ he is, just like her mother, who… makes bad decisions, and she shakes her head. 

He smiles at her, tells her that no one in the world is perfect enough to control another person, that no one deserves to be controlled. “Part of being human,” he tells her, “with or without magic, is having free will. One of the worst things one can do is take away someone’s free will.” And then he tells her that free will means choices, and some of those choices are bad, but that doesn’t always mean they’re bad people. 

“So mother,” she asks, “made a bad choice, but she’s not a bad person?” 

And her father smiles and says “ _Exactly,_ ” and kisses her forehead; they walk to dinner together, her hand reaching up to rest in the crook of his arm.

She sits at the dinner table next to Tori, and she smiles at her parents as she eats her food. (She decides that just because people make mistakes doesn’t mean she can’t love them.) For the next few months, everything continues on, and then one day she is hugging her mother goodbye, watching as Astoria kisses her cheeks messily and her parents shake hands. Then, her mother turns on her heel and walks out, closing the door behind her. 

A year later, Daphne and Astoria are wearing fluffy pink dresses, watching as their mother is married to the man from the library. Two years after that, she holds her baby brother in her arms, Tori on her left and her father behind them, his hands resting gently on their shoulders. She smiles brightly as the shutter closes, and she frames two copies, one for each of her bedrooms. 

When she is ten-turning-eleven, she realizes that her mother loves Christopher more than she loves Daphne. She leaves for Hogwarts only a few months later, and she is relieved - she has heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder. She writes her father and Astoria every day, and her mother every two weeks.

Daphne grows up split between two homes, lovingly stitching up the jags and tears in her life with crimson thread. (She is sorted into Slytherin, but courage runs through her veins. Besides, red has always been her favorite color, and she has been crowned in gold from birth.) She gets to Hogwarts, and she makes friends with people who have more will than they know what to do with, and she thinks: _good_. 

The most interesting people are the ones who make their own choices, regardless of other people’s expectations.


End file.
